MESSENGER ARRIVES, Mercury Orbit Insertion |
MESSENGER ARRIVES, Mercury Orbit Insertion |
Mar 17 2011, 05:29 AM
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Senior Member Group: Admin Posts: 3108 Joined: 21-December 05 From: Canberra, Australia Member No.: 615 |
Less than 20 hours now until the MESSENGER spacecraft fires its engine to enter orbit at Mercury.
Live Webcast March 17th – broadcast starts at 0030 UTC. Follow the progress: http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/mer_orbit.html. There will be commentary on the mission, real-time coverage of the maneuver, animation of what the spacecraft is doing, a view of the carrier’s Doppler as they receive it, and live video from MESSENGER Mission Operations. Remember that the Canberra DSN is providing two-way communication with MESSENGER We'll be using both DSS43 (70-metre) and DSS34 (34-metre) antennas. Good luck to the team at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). |
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Mar 18 2011, 04:32 PM
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Administrator Group: Admin Posts: 5172 Joined: 4-August 05 From: Pasadena, CA, USA, Earth Member No.: 454 |
Fantastic news! And if you haven't seen it already, Emily has made an absolutely gorgeous pic for her blog, showing Mercury's size compared to other familiar bodies in the solar system... http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002965 I'm glad you liked that; I'm pleased with how it turned out, though of course it looks good mostly because of Ted's excellent processing work. It's wonderful what matching phase angles and lighting directions will do to improve the feel of a montage. I spent half an hour discussing that image with my girls' babysitter last night -- a fun conversation Indeed, a very nice comparison. But we already know of two other bodies in that size range, namely Pluto and Eris, making a total of 10. As Stu said, we don't have images of those! --but in the text and caption I did make an error about how these were all the things in the solar system between 2000 and 6000 km across -- should've stuck with 2500-6000 and I'd've been correct; or just left Triton off and left it at 3000-6000. I have a massive cheat sheet above my desk that I use to do quick size comparisons, but I don't have the KBOs on there yet because I'm still working on hunting down the best estimates of their sizes. I have got to finish that project. Emily's survey is great! I felt proud to recognize each orb, like a bunch of old friends. Me too The challenge for us uber-geeks is to know just from looking at them which spacecraft was responsible for each image. -------------------- My website - My Patreon - @elakdawalla on Twitter - Please support unmannedspaceflight.com by donating here.
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Mar 18 2011, 04:59 PM
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Interplanetary Dumpster Diver Group: Admin Posts: 4405 Joined: 17-February 04 From: Powell, TN Member No.: 33 |
-but in the text and caption I did make an error about how these were all the things in the solar system between 2000 and 6000 km across -- should've stuck with 2500-6000 and I'd've been correct; or just left Triton off and left it at 3000-6000. It isn't an error - all are in that range. -------------------- |
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